100 million iPhone displays to be made by...Samsung!

by
Jay Jay4/15/2016 3:37:30 PM

4/15/2016 3:37:30 PM

While its no secret that LG and Samsung are ramping up their OLED display production lines for a possible iPhone contract, Wall Street Journal's Chinese website now reports that Samsung has bagged a deal to manufacture 100 million OLED displays for an iPhone to be launched next year.

The contract will run for three years which means that Apple may continue to use OLED displays in three successive generations of iPhones.

The use of OLED display will begin with iPhone 7s and 7s Plus considering Apple will use the same nomenclature for future iPhones the way it has done so far. According to 9to5Mac, the deal is worth close to $2.59 billion which means Samsung will earn close to quarter of a billion dollars each year from the deal.

However, the report is silent on whether LG has entered into a separate contract with Apple to manufacture OLED displays or if it has lost out on the deal.

The fact that Samsung Display has been awarded the lucrative contract by Apple doesn't surprise anyone. The company has perfected the Super AMOLED display technology and the ones in premium Galaxy S devices are among the superior ones in the industry.

Samsung has also been entrusted by the Korean government to launch a smartphone with a display resolution of 11K in time for the Winter Olympics in 2018. Reportedly, the South Korean government is pumping in an enormous $26 million towards its development. Once released, the display will feature 2250 pixels per inch, which will be gigantic compared to 577 ppi in Galaxy S6. A leap of technology indeed.

Last month, industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that iPhone 7S will launch with a glass body and will sport a curved OLED display with smaller side bezels than those in iPhone 6s display. The curved display could be similar to the ones in Samsung's Galaxy S7 Edge and Galaxy Note Edge devices.

According to a report in Nikkei, Apple are looking very seriously at using OLED displays in iPhones from 2018 onwards which is sending Samsung and LG into a frenzy of perfecting the R&D that goes into the displays to eliminate obvious issues with this type of display, primarily to do with it dulling over time.

An OLED display has some really amazing advantages over traditional ones like brighter vivid colours and rich and deeper blacks. The drawbacks are that this type of display dims over time and deteriorates. The first time OLED was used in a phone's display was back in 2010 when Samsung used it on its superstar Galaxy range of phones. Its phones have since grown in stature with the display being proclaimed as the best in the industry.

Last year, Bloomberg reported that Apple opened a development lab in Taiwan to create future iPhone displays that will be thinner yet brighter and sharper than the existing ones. The discreet lab houses a number of engineers who previously worked for firms like AU Optronics and Qualcomm. Apple's presence in Taiwan is no secret though, as Foxconn, the largest contract assembler and manufacturer of Apple's iPhones, is based in the country.